Child doing safety announcements - Baker St Bakerloo Line

While passing through Baker St on the Bakerloo Line today I'm convinced I heard a child's voice making an announcement about standing back from the edge of the platform etc. Is it for real or was I imagining it?

There was one at Leeds, which did my bloody head it telling us not to trespass on the railway, the volume switch was far too high for a start. It seems to have gone the same way as the same irritating hologram at the bottom of the escalator. Hopefully in the bin!
Sam

While passing through Baker St on the Bakerloo Line today I'm convinced I heard a child's voice making an announcement about standing back from the edge of the platform etc. Is it for real or was I imagining it?

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You are right . I heard it and thought I was going demented !!

It’s very unprofessional and sounds ridiculous I think... and like someone else said they turned the volume for it up full blast.

If this refers to S stock, increasing the gap is a result of having step free access and tight curves.

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In the majority of places overall the gap has been reduced anyway, through a combination of factors including thinner cars at sole bar level and moving platform coping stones. This is the reason why, for example, the A stock couldn't run south of Wembley Park after withdrawal. At Baker Street many of the gaps are smaller, but in a few places they have increased unavoidably due to longer cars and different door placements. It's always going to be a compromise on a network such as the Tube, and you can only mitigate the risk rather than eradicate it - as mentioned, tight curves will always increase the gaps. It should also be noted that the gaps at Baker Street are not as wide as some on the network - Waterloo and Bank both spring to mind. It's a fact of life, unfortunately, that some people just won't notice the various mitigations in place and not mind the gap.

Canary Wharf Jubilee Line station held an open day recently during which children could make platform announcements.

Airlines have interesting approaches to the safety videos, I have seen some narrated by children or comedians in an attempt to make us watch.

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Virgin Atlantic a couple of years ago had theirs along the lines of "what if a gigantic squid got hold of the aircraft?" Definitely engaged me more than normal (I always make a point of trying to pay attention, but my mind invariably wanders with the normal style of video)

Interesting that it takes a childs voice to make people pay attention to the message - I wonder what the psychology is at play here?

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I'd imagine it's the same as was deployed by the Central Office of Information when they made short films for insertion in cinema programmes and at the end of TV broadcasting for the day in the 1980s/1990s. An ex-colleague of my wife's was responsible for some of them, and there was one I recollect which pleaded with car drivers to make sure small children were adequately strapped in: it was spoken by a child, and the unspoken message was that children were getting killed or seriously injured because of driver thoughtlessness. The fact that I still remember it after 30 years (and I wasn't its target market) shows they CAN have an effect.